


Hey, Quick Question - Why?

by prixiam



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616, Spider-Man (Comicverse)
Genre: (?), Bad Attempts at Jokes, Body Horror, Comic Book Continuity, F/M, Gender Dysphoria, Gender or Sex Swap, Genderswap, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Not MCU compliant, Rape/Non-con Elements, Sexswap, Snarky Peter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-28
Updated: 2018-05-17
Packaged: 2019-04-28 20:53:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14457531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prixiam/pseuds/prixiam
Summary: He really hopes he doesn’t have to sue Jessica Drew for use of the name ‘Spider-Woman’. He already had a good brand going.-Peter Parker wakes up in an apartment in Jersey (of all places), naked, with a woman's body. Backtracking through those events isn't going to be his greatest moment.





	1. Chapter One

x. 

The good thing about being drugged is that Peter doesn’t remember most of what’d happened to him - and yeah, that really was the good thing.

Swimming in his head were huge chunks and little slivers and big hulking gaps telling parts of stories - stories set in dark rooms with cool temperatures, with masked faces attached to indistinct bodies. It took concerted effort, brow sweating and hands cramping, to try and grab at the pieces that bobbed up to the surface of the opiate cocktail keeping him asleep. And even then, there were only snapshots, mostly. A thick silver ring on a finger, carved like a writhing snake. An upstate accent saying " _now that's a pretty face"_ and laughing _._ Listening and hearing the whip-crack of a bone breaking in a super-strong grip.

But when he didn’t try and just laid still, riding the choppy comedown of a high, there were memories that would just wash up to him. Not many of them, not ones he wanted, but enough that when he finally was awake, feeling wrecked and wishing for death, the surprises aren’t all that surprising.

Like -

Peter remembered wiggling his fingers in front of his face, the world behind him a dark oakish blur. He was drooling and giggling and saying “Gosh” because they looked thin and dainty and how’d they support him if he tried to climb a wall? And he remembered another hand of flickering five-no-seven-no-really-five fingers, thick and muscled and oily, slipping from his cheek to behind his head while yet another hand brushed hair off his face. And hair that curled and caught light to show a rainbow of metallic browns, that seemed endlessly long and unbelievably soft - even when the hand pulled and shot pain through Peter’s head.

And he remembered a dream about Gwen - his Gwen, not Other Gwen, and not any other other Gwens from alternate universes that exist just to dick him around. His Gwen and her coral pink lipstick and vanilla-scented lotion on hands that wrapped around his shoulders and found knots to undo in his back. Who laid her head on his shoulder and played with those too-long curls of hair and stayed as the world lurched and spun and shifted colors and sounds and sensations, who held his hand and whispered “ _I'm here”_ when Peter felt hot nausea burn through his blood and his guts and bone splinter and shift and stretch out under his skin. Who pressed a soft kiss to his lips while something dissolvable was shoved in sleeping Peter’s mouth.

And he could hold on to the memory of his Gwen in that dream, the hyper-real lucidity of her touch and her smirk and the dimples when she laughed, even when there were real-world gloved hands gripping his wrists and his hips and pain so raw and new that Peter saw stars.

Peter wants to remember to want to call Other Gwen when he wakes up, just to hear her voice again, see the way she tilts her head and holds her hands on her hips, just like Gwen Stacy did. He didn’t like talking to Spider-Woman-Gwen, but now he wanted to, and wanted to remember wanting to when he was awake. But like so much, he doesn’t when he’s finally awake and wholly unwilling to deal with the world.

So Peter lies on the surface of wherever-he-was, keeping his eyes shut and teeth holding back all the vomit that desperately wants to get out of him. He’s freezing and too hot at the same time in different parts of his body - there’s, like, a scratchy, starchy sheet thrown over him that he’ll kick and grip and twist around - and every tiniest movement, too deep a breath or a shudder from the chill, would send him careening over the edge of the bed to pump his stomach empty the old fashioned way.

Spectacular Spider-Man, indeed.

He slips in and out of - sleep? A coma? Drug induced haze and high? - a few more times. At some point he came to the conclusion he’d probably been beaten over the head with a bat or pipe, concussed or skull cracked, considering the dizziness that comes with lying flat on his back, and he estimates that whatever he’d been given is probably meant to kill wild game with the way it bypasses straight through his high tolerance for poisons and venom.

As time wore on - though how much of it, Peter had no idea - he’d brave his eyes to open and spy the interior of a decent hotel room, neutral furniture and nothing in the way of identification. Later still he’d realize he was wrong again - and it’s actually someone’s apartment, someone who's decorating taste consisted only of white on white on slightly-off white and a single, decadent leather chair. Someone’s safe-house, where nobody actually lived.

His hands grab for the edge of the nightstand and all his body creaks and cracks, pleased and pissed to be made upright again. The spinning is still there but he can deal - Peter spends half his days being tossed around, a little vertigo is nothing - but man, he’s thankful for a wall to grab onto.

Walking is making Peter pay attention to how off his body is. No, it’s not the tripping or the fever sweats or the lurching of the room as his brain catches up to his feet. It’s the tickle of hair on the small of his back and against his ribcage. It’s the bounce and shifting weight on his chest - and the lack of it at his groin. It’s the feeling of space being empty when there used to be something and space being filled when it should be empty, with things like shoulders or hips or, or….well he’s not articulate on the best of days and today is really not one of them.

He can find the light switch and lean against the merciful cold of a ceramic sink - spitting dizziness right into the drain - with his long dainty fingers, and he can’t stop the wince when he stares in the mirror.

...

......

.........

_Man_ , he’s an ugly girl.

Peter’s lucky if, on a good day, he can come across as someone’s niche nerd type. After years of resetting his nose from super-powered punches and swinging face-first into skyscrapers, he’d been blessed to not look like some gargoyle in cheap pommade. None of it seemed to have gone over well in his surprise gender change; in general, most of the shapes are the same (should he be disappointed he’s not a blonde bombshell?), but just...softer. Curvier. Boobs-ie-er. Same bent nose and same off-color teeth and same cowlick - but mixed in with bigger lips and no jaw and the sweaty, gray, and bloodshot look of an addict deep in withdrawal. Also boobs. Boobs that felt both really good and really _weird_ to touch, covered in gooseflesh and sweat.

He _really_ hopes he doesn’t have to sue Jessica Drew for use of the name ‘Spider-Woman’. He already had a good brand going.

\- no, focus here. He bites down on his tongue, tells his brain to get to work, goddamnit.

Peter definitely had been hit over the head at some point; a partially swollen lump misshapes the left side of his head and snaps jabbing pain when he presses light touch against it. He taps the knuckle-shaped purple bruise by his mouth with a hiss, tilts his neck to see the thumbprints on his windpipe and ring of yellowing fingers around his neck. Scale is hard to tell when the cramped bathroom is rocking back and forth, and his neck isn’t as thick as it used to be, so Peter can’t tell how large his absent assailant’s hands were. They’re twice as wide as his hand is now, he sees, laying a palm rinsed in cold water on the flushed skin.

He can certainly say that whoever it was really liked to grab and scratch, given how pockmarked his arms are with welts and swells. They’re even trailing down his sides, discolored splotches of purple, yellow, green trailing down from ribs to freshly cinched-in-waist, probably from -

He seethes, leaning his forehead against the mirror, pressing his eyes shut till he almost split the skin and inhaling through his teeth. He grips and claws at the ceramic sink, listening to the scratch of nails against it, skin burning and stomach churning and c’mon Pete, pull it together….

Okay. First thing first - shower. Because he smells like old sweat and puke.

There’s a single bar of soap in the bath but Peter prefers the strategy of cranking up the water up to boiling and just standing there, eventually sitting, until he feels human again. Rubbing at the pulse in his temples and watching the water pool and part around his long feet, Peter tries to actually plan what he should do next. Find some scissors because wow, this is a _lot_ of hair, and it weighs like he’s got a wool coat glued to his head. Find some clothes - ideally find his suit, good luck with that. Decide which is the least mortifying - going to the Avengers’ med team or the Baxter Building to get himself fixed. Or unfixed. Peter feels his face go red and he shifts his legs reflexively, even though there’s nothing there right now.

Also, when there’s no chance he’ll throw it up, eat. The thought of food gnaws at him and turns his stomach simultaneously, but he can recognize some of the heaviness in his muscles and the echo chamber of a headache as want of a meal.

The water’s turning cold before Peter finally climbs out of it, not spry and not well - but a damn good better than where he was at going in. One closet pillaging later sees him wrapped up in a big fluffy towel and shoving hair out of his face, pulling drawers out of dressers to find something that’ll explain whose house this is. Which, of course, there isn’t. This is someone’s safe-house apartment, a place to crash and hide and keep nothing behind; there’s three change of clothes, all of them nondescript, what you wear to disappear into a crowd, and two microwave meals in a dorm-style kitchenette. It’s ramen (but the worst flavor - _shrimp_ ) and the clothes are tagged as men’s XL, which would fit him before, but not anymore.

He wonders how much height he’s lost, how much weight, and shrugs off the question ‘ _how do you lose mass’_ with ‘ _I know Norse gods’_. The t-shirt clings too much to his, ahem, chest, and the jeans are only holding up by the world’s hardest working belt and pure gumption, but it’ll do. Considering the alternative is to go Lady Godiva on the town, it’ll do.

Next - a look out the window. Like any good New York apartment, there’s only one window, tucked away in the farthest corner behind the chair and kept tightly shut with both blinds and blackout curtains. Almost like someone doesn’t want peeping toms in the place they stash their kidnap victims. Peeling them back frees the mercifully muted sun of late evening, the last bits of light glinting off the blackish water of the Hudson. But before he can pull up his mental map of the city, he notices the very lovely view of Liberty Island. The view of it from the wrong side of the Hudson.

He's in New Jersey.

Of course this happened to him in New Jersey. _Of course._

Right, rearranging travel plans. A quick test - a roll of the wrist and a mess of web on the wall - confirms that whatever was done to his body didn’t alter his powers and he can still climb walls with the best of them. Getting from Jersey to midtown isn’t that bad a swing, maybe ninety minutes tops, but even standing still is making him wobble, so throwing some web slinging is most likely going to end with a Parker pancake on the sidewalk. He's got no mask either, and for as unrecognizable as he is now, Peter hasn’t lived this long by having a photographable face.

That burning, pulsating headache is coming back.

Really, he doesn’t have a whole lot of options right now. Either that or wait for his jailer to come back.

So with one final look in the bathroom mirror to confirm that, yes, he's still a girl and yes, he still looks like shit, Peter Parker hits the town.

...and then doubles back to check the number on the apartment door. That’s going to be important. 619, he repeats to himself, slowly walking to the elevator. 619, apartment 619 in the Mermont Towers complex, where the guy at the front desk doesn’t even look up from his phone as a human mess walks out on bare, unsteady feet.

Being outside is being kicked in the teeth by sound and light and smell and Peter almost throws up right there in the doorway but manages to get to an alleyway to do it there instead. And it being Jersey, nobody cares enough to go and see if he’s okay, which he’s more than happy for as he grips the handle of a dumpster and spits bile out onto the trash. Which only makes the curdling, toe-clenching reek of the city upset him further.

What the hell had he been dosed with? Part of his head - the awake, always-sensible science part - is trying to tell him he should try and save a sample, run some tests on his saliva to find out what compound affects him this severely. A team of mad scientists with mad PhDs usually need a few months to cook up something to give him an upset stomach let alone break through years of inoculation and mutated immunity, and this? This feels like he should be dead. But the part of his head that’s fried - which is most of it right now - just really wants to go back to bed. And to do that, he needs to get back to Manhattan.

Best bet is getting towards the center of this city (Newark? That might explain the smell), towards taller buildings, where a fall and a swing gets the most distance covered the quickest. So that’s what he’ll do.

Square up his shoulders, wipe the gross off his lips, and head to the downtown, praying that if he keeps moving that the buildings will stop swimming in front of him and the cars will stop honking.

Moving feels odd. Not just in the ‘oh god I’m so ill I’d rather be shot in the face than breath right now’ way, but in how clothes felt brushing his skin, how he balanced when moving from one foot to the next. Doing the work he does the way he does it, Peter’s learned how his body operates on a minuscule scale - what every muscle does when it tightens and relaxes and gets torn or is loose. How he shifts his weight is the difference between landing with a lot of broken bones or being able to roll away after the Lizard throws him thirteen stories down. And it's different now, with fatty tissue having slid around and bones adjusted and organs all rearranged, center of weight gone lower and wider. It’s creating a gnawing feeling somewhere between his heart and his stomach that set his teeth on edge.

And okay, he definitely just stepped in gum. Fantastic.

Peter settles on a thirty-some story building some ten miles from the Lincoln Tunnel, so he's going to be lucky to get into the city by nightfall. He looks both ways and doesn’t cross the street but ducks into the service alleyway and puts his hands and feet to work. Moving vertically is easier than horizontally, but he still can’t move as quickly as he’d like to or can’t press himself up to the brick-and-stonework as close as he usually does. Arm muscles are already burning when he heaves himself onto the roof, wiping sweat off his face. Can’t reach as far as he used to. This is going to be one hell of an evening commute.

The first plummet is the one that spills the adrenaline into his bloodstream and kicks his brain into survival mode. Peter wraps the web lifeline around his knuckles twice and trusts its strength, inhaling cold air through his nose and teeth, and picks the next building to shoot the web out to. It’s a split-second judgement of architectural security and stability - preference for older buildings with stone and concrete, less for glass - but you can get a pattern going. And sometimes that means falling ten, twenty, thirty feet, stopping the momentum from throwing him feet-first through a window or plate-glass, but this is second nature. He has actually done this in his sleep a thousand times.

But he’s so, so off his game. He might as well be playing Scrabble on a Monopoly board.

Peter’d be able to use his mass to throw himself through tricker jumps, crossing gaps without needing to use an inch of webbing. But however many pounds he’s lost has got him judging them wrong, scrambling to aim and shoot and then scrape his feet on a billboard he should have easily avoided. Hair keeps swinging into his face and mouth and blocking crucial views of street signs, and even when it’s not, it catches the wind and snags and feels like it’ll pull his scalp out wholesale. The stolen clothes (which he feels mildly guilty about) are pretty atrocious for his highwire act, and he's not going to be surprised if he sees tabloids for a web-slinging woman that flashed the city of Newark - or maybe Jersey City? Anything southwest of the Hudson is just an undistinguished blob of awfulness.

But now he’s very mercifully not in New Jersey anymore. The soles of his feet land on the solid roof of a high rise and Peter leans against an air conditioning unit to catch his breath. From first glance, in the dark, it's not easy to tell if this is Soho or Hell’s Kitchen; the street below him is sectioned off for reconstruction and a chunk of a bar looks like it was torn off during a fight. The skyline’s obscure in clouds and pollution, so he’s going to need a minute to reorient himself. To knock the wheeze out of his breathing.

All of him is aching, inside and out. Arms and shoulders and back have lethargy burning them inside out and Peter can’t hold his hands steady for more than a microsecond. He tips his head back, forehead on the hot AC unit, just breathing deep. And even though sitting feels great - so, so great, he never wants to get up again - it’s draining the flying high out of him, and that was 100% the only reason he could press on.

Fuck. He hits his head on the AC unit, trying to kick a plan into his head and - oh fuck, he’d been hit there. Lightning shoots through the left side of his skull and dark clouds seep in through his eyes. Don’t pass out on me Parker, c’mon….

Okay. So if he’s in Hell’s Kitchen, or anywhere near Hell’s Kitchen, then he's in Daredevil’s turf. And Daredevil likes him - okay, Daredevil doesn’t _hate_ him. Push comes to shove, Matt Murdock’s always had his back in a fight and would lend at least a few hours’ aide. Also hey, if he's a girl now, that betters the odds of Murdock helping; Daredevil can never resist a damsel in distress. Peter closes his eyes, digs his (much longer, sharper, ow) nails into his palms to both distract and to focus.

He can't hear any cars backfiring or civilians yelling, so there’s no fighting going on tonight. And that leaves about three places where Daredevil could be angsting about - his apartment (45th and 10th), his office (9th and 55th), or some girl’s apartment, the mopey stud. Going to the law office risks running into the sighted half of Nelson & Murdock, so Peter’ll just...break into Daredevil’s apartment and crash there, okay, good plan.

But first he needs to be able to stand up.

Legs threatening to buckle and back willing to break, Peter gets himself upright with the promise of _almost there_ and tries to rake back hair. It’s all turned into a mess of unmanageable clumps, snagging on his fingers and hurting when Peter pulls them out. Maybe if he’d turned into a more attractive girl, he’d be more confident in getting Daredevil’s help…

He looks over at the next building, trying to judge where’d be best to shoot a web and get this last leg going - but it’s not staying still. Peter squints and the high-rise is still swaying left to right with the speed of a hula dancer. But it might be Peter who’s swaying, and one step forward suggests that they both probably are, the building going east as Peter dips very solidly to the west.

Almost there, he begs himself, almost there…

Without much more debating and some very careful fire escape climbing, he takes the option of just walking the ten or fifteen blocks to Murdock’s place. The fall is a lot less life-threatening that way and the street signs easier to read, with the trade off of more broken glass to step around. He keeps his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched forward, the well-understood ‘not interested’ New York signal, stepping largely around the parked cars and the overflowing garbage cans. And yet he’s very aware of a lot more eyes following him, a craning neck turning the corner when he does. Because yeah, he does look like a disaster, even more than normal.

Hell’s Kitchen is a smattering of good restaurants between sleazy bars, gentrified apartments and the gambling dens preferred most by Kingpin goons. Peter’s never quite gotten what Murdock sees in the place when midtown is so much more superior and the same kind of ludicrously expensive, and it’s not even like his building is particularly interesting or cheap to justify renting in it. Peter has to press his nose right up to the wall to read the occupant list, find the top floor ‘UNLISTED’ that he knew was the lawyer’s abode, and only realize after he’s jammed on the buzzer that he had no idea if Murdock was home or why he’d try the front door first. Maybe it was the path of least resistance. He’s really not up to dealing with whatever security Matt has in place. Make it easy Murdock, and just answer the door.

Peter ring again. And again. And scowls. Why don’t people just answer the unexpected three AM knock on the door?

...Goddamn, he just wants to lie down. Put something in his stomach to get rid of these shakes and the spinning, drink a gallon of water and maybe three gallons of beer, just get out of this cold night air and into someplace familiar and sensible and without the hair on the back of his neck standing up. But nope, that’s not Peter Parker’s life. His life means wrapping sweaty palms around the bottom rung of his friend’s fire escape, pressing bruised ribs and cut feet into the metal, counting floors and wheezing for the fifteen flights up to Matt futzing Murdock’s stupid loft window. That is - Mary upon on high, hallelujah - easily unlocked from the outside. Probably because Daredevil needs an easy way into his place too.

Murdock’s apartment is big and spacious in a way that reeks of a lawyer’s salary, without any of the fancy furniture you’d expect in a loft. The living room doesn't even have a television, just a couch and two chairs and a single bookshelf probably filled with boring lawyer books. But it smells like Daredevil (and no, that's not a weird thought) - tastefully bland cologne and something like shoe leather or dried blood.

_There_ , Peter says, falling into the couch like a loved one’s arms. Ribs aching and back seizing and letting the both lull him unconscious, Peter just thinks _made it_ before giving up, very solidly, for the day.


	2. Chapter Two

x.

Matt Murdock can hear the heartbeat before he knows it’s coming from his apartment. Distinctly, faintly arrhythmic, quicker than average, medically undetectable as mutated. It’s Spider-Man. He can only become more and more certain of it as the elevator rises and he centralizes the heartbeat. Matt wraps his fingers, tightly, around his cane. It’s fast - erratic - Parker’s under stress - and at the apartment door, Matt can smell the cocktail of sweat, ozone, bile, and breath that read out like vital signs.

He turns the key and locks the door instantly after coming inside.

There’s Peter Parker’s heartbeat in his apartment, but Peter Parker isn’t there.

Matt sets his cane in its place by the door and slips off his shoes, the better to move quietly around the edges of the furniture. His breath catches somewhere between his lungs and his throat. The shape on his couch is human - a woman, late twenties, wheezing in high whines, wrapped in a tangle of long limbs and fever sweats. There’s blood, but just on her feet - tiny cuts from broken glass, scrapped skin mixed with pieces of gravel, metal, and rooftop soot. She has Parker’s heartbeat. And you can’t mimic that.

“Shit.” He kneels by the side of the couch, taking in her condition. “...shit.”

There’s stomach bile in her breath but no smells of food or drink. No food or alcohol poisoning - dry heaving, Matt notes with a face. But something else, which takes a deeper inhale and several seconds parsing through his memory to try and identify. Thick, rich, floral - almost like cinnamon, a sensation like tar sticking on his fingers and tongue. Not heroin - there’s nothing mixed in with it - and no trace of smoke. But opium, organic and potent, and Matt’s shocked his Parker’s heart isn’t in pieces once he’s sure of the dosage.

The woman’s face is thinned and trembling with the effort of breathing. Large eyes set deep in her face, skin hanging off the low bones in her cheeks beneath her eyes - the ridge of the nose uneven and crooked from self-setting the breaks. A thick bottom lip bobbing as she formed unspoken, fevered words - a small chin but a long jaw, thin, strong muscles bulging under burning skin. Five foot eight, at maximum, but longer legs and arms than torso - small breasts, wide hips, the clothing stolen from a man but only smelling of department stores and dresser drawers. Long hair in tangles, reeking of urban air and the sweat that glues it to her skin. Pieces of her, Matt can pinpoint as Parker’s. Without the evidence heartbeat, he’d think they were cousins. But there - unless you knew where to look, you couldn’t see it. The raised skin under each wrist, too thick to be veins, where Matt knows webbing comes out. You don’t fake that.

No broken bones, but without feeling her skin with his hands, he couldn’t tell other injuries. As fast and hard and hoarse as she gulps down air, Matt can’t hear lung punctures or fluid in there. It’s withdrawal from what she’s been drugged with. So he doesn’t think twice about reaching under her neck and her legs, pulling (approximately) one hundred and fifty pounds of human up into his arms. Her head lolls against his neck. Matt can pick words out of the salad the fever has her saying as he steps from living room to bedroom.

“Should’ve….should’ve knocked……”

“Yeah. At least tell me when you’re coming by.”

“Don’t-”

Matt lays the body out on the bed, trying to convince his mind of something different than what it’s seeing. When the shirt rides up and he reads the curves as female, he takes the second to stop and say no, it’s a trick, and it’s Peter Parker burying his face into pillows. Matt throws two blankets over top and takes the chair by his window. He takes his glasses down, and rubs at the migraine in his temples.

At eleven pm, Foggy Nelson’s catching up on late night talk shows and work, and answers his phone at the first ring. “Let me guess,” he yawns, “you’re not going to be in the office tomorrow?”

“Spider-Man broke into my apartment and tried not to die on my couch.”

“Is this code for something? Or do you want to press charges against Spider-Man? Because either way, I’m going to need a _lot_ more information than that.”

“I’ll have my phone - just email me for any updates, or if Kramskoi ever gets back to us about those contracts.”

“Say hi to Spider-Man for me.”

Matt’s rarely on this end of bedside duties, making sure there’s no spike in body temperature or sudden seizures. When, bleary eyed and incoherent, Parker is conscious, Matt’s shoving a glass of water between his lips and asking questions. “Do you know where you are?”

“You’re a new guy,” Parker says, the voice light, barely making it out of his throat. “Different. Last one...blonde.” He tries to bare his teeth in a threatening grin but slides down the headboard. “Think you...you can take me?”

“Can you tell me your name?”

“Queen Elizabeth.” Peter closes his eyes. “And fuck you.” He’s out cold again. But his heart’s steady.

Perhaps belatedly, Matt considers calling a doctor. Involving hospital administration in anything involving his other line of work is a disaster, but there are enough people with medical licenses in his phonebook that could make house-calls. But if the positions were switched, Matt would want to make the decision himself. He’d wait until Parker could too - or until there isn’t any other option.

“How’s the house-guest?” Foggy asks, bright and chipper and caffeinated by the tone in his voice. Matt shifts, back cracking after spending the night asleep upright in his chair.

“Sleeping off an overdose.”

“...so, uh, yeah. Wow. Okay then.” Foggy coughs and waits a few seconds. “What’d you need?”

“There’s a ledger in my desk. Top drawer on the right hand side, under the false bottom. I need Hank Pym’s numbers, all of them.”

Matt’s the last man alive who can trust Hank Pym to do a competent job; Pym appreciates it, even more than he lets on. He won’t call if he can help it, Matt repeats in his head. And, if there isn’t any other option, what better doctor to treat Spider-Man than an entomologist?

“You look familiar,” Peter rasps.

“We’re friends. We watch each others’ backs.”

Peter seems to contemplate this for a while. The rising and falling of his chest is even, but Matt hears the rattle of bile in his throat. “There was a woman here,” he slurs. “The one with dark hair?”

“There’s been nobody here but me, all day.”

“No. The...the one with the glowy eyes? Where’d she go?” He turns his head, burying it in the nest of hair on the pillow. “Said she’d be right back. Had to….spells….”

“I’m the only one who’s been here, Peter,” Matt says. But he’s already asleep.

By evening the fever’s broke. Peter’s hands are still twitching underneath the blankets and Matt sets aside his phone. The heartbeat’s steady.

He gets up, intends to make two cups of coffee, and goes over which questions he’s going to start with

* * *

 Peter is more than happy to stay asleep for the next ten years, his head completely dreamless. Even when he becomes aware that somebody is staring at him, waking up seems too big of a hassle to deal with, and all his limbs were a thousand pounds. There’s the prickle on the back of his neck, his sixth sense for bad news telling him to get his ass in gear, getting more and more insistent the longer eyes are on him. But he’s comfortable, damnit, and moving means having to re-realize what’s happened to him. Not that he initially remembers that when he’s well and truly awake. Nor does he wholly remember whose couch he had crashed on. Initially there’s just the awareness that he’s messed his back up big time, his neck locked at an angle that means sweet mercy when it cracks, and persistent aches in every muscle he can still feel. His left side in particular feels ready to tear itself out and escape to Mexico, but hey, at least he’s not vomiting. That’s a plus.

And it's only when he realizes that it's a pillow - a bed-pillow, not a couch-pillow - that his head is resting on, and that it's not the place that he last remembers being in, that Peter's jolting upwards. Slowly, and in jerky, numb motions.

It is a bed, yes, and its in a bedroom with the type of vaulted ceilings that make top billing on the apartment listing. With the softest sheets underneath him, and a body in a roughly man-like shape beside it. Peter doesn’t know that until his eyes are open and the pale blurry blob to his left materializes into a man wearing a pressed shirt and leaning heavy on a white cane. It’s always awkward seeing people Peter knows better in costume in their civilian lives. He’s forgotten how cartoonishly red Matt’s hair is, especially in sunlight (what time is it?), or how well he can pass as just a normal guy with a shirt and some slacks.

“I was wondering when you’d finally wake up,” says Matt, careful to be quiet.

Peter tries to sit up and - okay, no, not doing that again. He lets his head fall at an angle on the headboard and the painful stiffness turn back into pins and needles.

“I wouldn’t move if I were you. You’ve got some bruised ribs there.” Well, that explains a lot. For whatever reason, Murdock isn’t acting like pissed out of his head to find an intruder in his house and passed out on his couch; he’s tense, coiled like a spring and the ready to swing the cane as a club, and he only passes a glass of water in Peter’s direction. A number of empty glasses clutter the bedside table, he notices. Water glasses and pain pills, enough to kill off a small mammal and maybe help a vigilante.

“Thanks,” croaks out Peter, and his face scrunches at the sound of his voice. It’s hoarse but high, like he’s been simultaneously punched in the throat and the balls. Leaning over as little as he could, he sips at the water, spilling more of it on the floor.

“I’ll admit it’s been a while since I last had a guest over, but I think I’m supposed to be the one to invite you in.” His red glasses catch the light. That’s probably a bad sign.

“Maybe if you’d have been home, you could have, instead of making me break open your window.” Peter uses both hands to grip the edge of the couch and uses it to push himself upright, admittedly into more of a slouch than a sitting position. The living room takes a little bit longer to set itself up, moving around Matt in grossly slow lurches. “Which, if the lock is broken, I’m sorry, but I can’t afford to replace it.” The tiniest corner of Matt’s mouth twitched. It dawns on Peter that he's not sure if Matt knows its  _him_ , Spider-Man, of if this is just how Murdock plays with all of his home invaders. After tucking them into bed.... Peter shakes his head which is, again, a mistake.

“I’m going to ask you some questions, if you're feeling able to answer them." He’s reading Peter’s face, listening in on his heartbeat; Murdock’s in lawyer-mode, which is only slightly worse than Daredevil-mode. “First. On a scale from one to ten, one being nothing and ten being the worst pain you’ve ever felt, how bad are you hurt?”

Alright, he had expected something else. Something a little more ‘ _who are you_ ’ or ' _are you this universe's Spider-Man or are you from another gender-bent one_ '. “Do I fail the test if I say twelve? Because twelve.” Why is he playing along with this? And there’s hair in his eyes again. He goes to shove it away from his face but his fingers get distracted by just how damn long it is; even knotted and greasy, it gets down to his elbows, stretches out to the full length of his arm when he pulls at it. But it’s the same shade of brown his hair has been forever. And it’s making him feel queasy just to look at.

_(“Yes, nice” whispers a voice and a finger traces down his jawline. “I like it long”.)_

“Easy,” Matt’s saying, up on his feet and grabbing Peter’s shoulders when he falls forward. Something between a chill and a seizure’s gotten a hold of him, making his hands spasm and go dirty snow gray while he tries to grip his knees. “Easy - I’m not going to hurt you.” Matt’s hands are calloused and tight when clamped down on Peter’s shoulders, not painfully, just keeping him upright.

“Fuck,” Peter spits out through his teeth, squeezing his eyes and pushing that image way back into the part of his head where the Bad Shit is locked up tight. Where he’s not going to think about it ever, ever again. But his hands won’t stop. “ _Fuck._ ” Listening to that hoarse, too-high voice coming out of his throat isn’t calming down the tremors, nor is balling his hands into fists and piercing the skin with too-long nails. 

Murdock knows when he’s not supposed to say anything and just keeps both hands firm and calm. And he doesn’t move until Peter’s taken a few deep, repetitive patterns of breathes, getting his heartbeat down and out of his throat, and when that happens he slips quietly away from the bed and frees up the space around Peter so flight-or-fight doesn’t kick in. He moves like a ninja into the mysterious parts of his apartment, leaving Peter to stay in a pattern of inhale, exhale, inhale. He shuts his eyes, leans back into his shoulders and the cold steel of the ultra-modern headboard. Absently his steadying fingers press the edges of the bruise by his mouth. It doesn’t hurt nearly as bad as before; he heals pretty quickly, at least compared to the average person. Give it another day and it’ll be just a yellowing shadow. And his fingers tap up his cheeks and eyes, exploring unfamiliar skin and the new bone structure new beneath it.

He needs to get back to normal - fast.

"Here."

The air smells like boiled cheese. When Peter opens his eyes back up, Murdock is holding a mug with his fingertips. "Ginger and valerian," he said by way of explanation, waiting for Peter to take the cup. "It ought to help."

"You make a weirdly good nurse. But I'm not drinking that." Peter screws up his face. "It smells like a trash fire."

"Peter."

"Oh, so you know who I am?"

"Since you first broke into my house? Yes. Heartbeats are unique to the individual," which Murdock had explained in general before, but not how Peter's differed so significantly from others that he could work on altering it for security. With a click, Matt sets the mug of tea down on the night table and swings his chair in closer, setting right up next to the side of the bed. He sits down, leaning his elbows on his upper thighs, and glaring pretty heavily. Except glaring isn’t exactly it - the intensity is there, but not anger, his face making an odd mix between ready-for-action and soft sympathy. “What happened?”

“Ain’t that the million dollar question.” The ends of his hair are tickling his elbows, and no matter how he shifts or wiggles, it’s still there. “Woke up in an apartment in Jersey yesterday, with the worst hangover, to this mess.” He waves a hand in front of his face and chest for way of not having to vocalize the obvious. “And I don’t remember a thing about how or why or who.”

“Then what’s the last thing you remember?”

There’s the soup of dark broth and drugs and a few over sharp sensations that Peter can relive if he'd let them, but it’s a lost cause to try and pick through them for a what could be the inciting incident. He’s not sure if it’s the head injury or the tranquilizers that tore up his memory that bad. His eyes drift up to the white, artistically industrial ceiling of Murdock’s loft as he tried to find an answer.

“I left work,” Peter says, squinting as his head throbs with the effort. “Went back to my place. Maybe watched the news? Get hit in the head.” His fingers go up to touch his skull - not the still sensitive bump on the left, but square in the back, where there’s not so much as a nodule to suggest bad injury.

“In your apartment or elsewhere?”

“An alley.” A snatch of sooty brickwork and a green dumpster comes up and Peter seizes on it. It's nothing different from any of the two trillion alleyways that pepper New York City, but there are ghosts slipping through it. Colored shapes and skin tones that suggest a few people, but his temple pulses in pain each time he tries to focus in on their faces or voices. “Not my usual bust-up. Don’t think Hobgoblin would have suddenly decided a sexchange was the way to deal with Spider-Man.” He looks down at his hands again, the swampy green bruises wrapping around his wrists like ugly bracelets. They’ve healed too much to tell if they’re from rope or cuffs or just strong fingers. “And I definitely don’t think any of them would be willing to take me to Jersey to do me in.”

Murdock taps both index fingers against his bottom lip, thinking.

“What’s today?” Peter posits, the headache getting worse the harder he tries to work through it.

“The fifteenth.”

Then fuck.

“Two weeks.”

“Hm?”

When he left the Bugle for the day, he remembers, it’d been after the first of the month roasting, when the editorial staff got everyone together to shout about what a shit job all the content writers were doing and how the newspaper was going to close its doors if people didn’t get their acts together. Peter in particular had been singled out for a series of truly atrocious pictures that put all of photography to shame, which was about average feedback from Jameson’s office, and he’d left feeling pretty good about himself after that.

“I lost two weeks,” he says up to the ceiling vents, heartbeat in somersaults. “I’ve almost definitely been fired.”

“Something takes you out,” Matt lays out, still tapping his lip as Peter blocks out the implications. “Given the thoroughness, it’s magic that’s caused this change.”

“Hey, how do you know how ‘thorough’-”

“Surgeries leave scars and magic doesn’t,” Murdock bites, “and you wouldn’t be moving if you had enough of your spine removed to get six inches shorter.” He slips his glasses up to rub the bridge of his nose. “And whatever or whoever - they kept you alive for two weeks. There was a reason. ...How did you get out?”

“Through a door.” Oh God, his aunt must be going crazy if he hasn’t checked in with her for two weeks. Peter desperately prays that he remembered to pay rent on the first. “Nobody was there when I woke up, and it was just an apartment. No evil lair, no snake pit, nothing.” God he hopes that rent was paid.

“...they go through the trouble of keeping you drugged and take you out of state, and don’t even leave a guard.”

“I have stupid archenemies,” he explains with a shrug.

Neither of them say much. A crockpot of nerves and surprise and residual narcotics leave Peter’s stomach feeling cramped and gross and his skin cold. This kind of powerlessness and confusion, while not entirely unfamiliar, leaves him feeling like a little kid in a nightmare, the surreality only adding horror to his lack of understanding. Murdock doesn’t make a lot of noise - even his breathing is virtually silent - and Peter feels incredibly alone in the large room. Alone and off and wanting to scrub his skin until it’s his again.

He wishes Matt could have some answers. Not even the ones for the mystery, but to just turn and say “ _Yeah, this happened to me too - don't sweat it”._ Or not Matt Murdock, but for MJ to slip her hand in his and to squeeze with the grip that says everything is going to be okay, for her to be here and have him feel stronger by her presence -  

Shit. MJ.

Already in his mind he can picture her face, red as her hair, screaming and sobbing and pounding on his chest with an accusatory finger about how worried she’s been, doesn’t he have any consideration for the rest of us.

“Peter?”

He lifts his head and Matt has his eyes level, a frown on his already lined face.

“Yeah, that’s me,” he says, but in a girl’s voice.

“What do you need?”

“A shower,” he mutters, which had been at the bottom of his list but somehow sounded like it was at the top, “and probably a change of clothes.” Peter glances down at the shirt he’d stolen, avoiding the soft curves and folds in the fabric below his collarbone. “I’m really not a Phillies fan.”

Matt Murdock keeps his bathroom suspiciously spotless, not a q-tip out of place. If Peter didn't know any different, he’d guess the bleach white tub would be hiding bloodstains and there might be a body in the linen closet, instead of just folded towels. The hot water just instantly comes on in the shower, instead of taking an hour to kick in like it does at his place, and it looks like Murdock doesn’t buy his shampoo and body wash from the dollar store. Show off.

He slips the t-shirt off his torso, his ribs briefly mewling in painful protest when his arms stretch up, and kicks the jeans off to the side of the room. The bruising below his torso is already healing up solidly, green having slipped mostly into yellow for the ones on his hipbone and stomach, and they stand out a lot less now that his skin isn't addict gray.

Peter presses his fingers against them, laying his palm flat against the thicker thighs and fattier hipbone and the few square inches of skin that hasn’t been punched or gripped to mincemeat. He’s glad, really really glad, he doesn’t remember what caused the wounds. His brain can guess, based on the size and shapes of human fingers and from where they fall on his thighs, but he doesn't remember, and therefore can just not acknowledge it. So he stops looking at them. Because they’re just not there, he’s decided.

The oval mirror reflects back at Peter a very, very tired face. He still thinks he makes an ugly woman but has to contend that it’s not as bad as the first glance. The nose isn’t wholly proportional to the rest of the smaller features and looks perfectly punchable, and the deep purple bags make his eyes look even larger than they'd become. He tries tightening the muscles in his jaw, sticks out his chin, to get lines and profiles looking right - but it just makes his neck look longer and more slender and his expression a childish pout.

But his eyes are still his own.

Peter can see himself - the him that he's always been - in the brown eyes, trapped by long lashes and thinner brows. Everything else is a mask - a fleshy organic mask, held in place with sinew and muscle and blood for paste. And if he could just find a way to get it off, get his nails in between some miniscule groove and rip and pull it off, Peter could have his own face back.

There is something he can fix, though.

One hand rummages through the drawers in Murdock’s bathroom cabinet, seizing upon a pair of scissors in triumph, and another grabs for the huge mass of tangled greasy hair. With fingernails and fists alike, Peter holds it up like it’s a sporty ponytail, as far away from his face and back as he can get it while still tilting his head at a visible angle. Without much further thought, it all comes off, falling onto the white tile of the bathroom floor and on Peter’s long toes.

He’ll have to give up that secret dream of being a hair stylist after looking at these results - the best feature is probably the clean ninety degree angle right at the back - but it goes a little way towards getting some of his face back. Running his fingers through it, shaking out the loose hairs, it stops at the length it’s supposed to now - which MJ had charitably described as 90s boyband pretty and he’d made his standard look out of spite and terrible decision making.

And right, he’s left the shower running. Well at least Murdock can afford that high water bill. The water turns pink and gray instantly when he steps inside, his feet having turned black and bloody after running on rooftops and Manhattan sidewalks barefoot (so Peter doesn’t think how he probably stained Matt’s very expensive looking leather couch, or tracked footprints through the apartment). He steals soap until he feels guilty, searing two weeks of cold sweats and vomit off his skin with lather and unreasonably hot temperatures, muscles melting to the point he’s at risk of just collapsing on the shower floor and making it his new permanent residence. Matt’s towels even feel pricey, thick and soft like they haven’t yet been run through the wash a million times. Probably because Matt has to throw out any linens Daredevil gets too much blood on - Peter does the same thing, except he just doesn’t replace them.

Like some weird doting nurse, Matt’s left a pile of folded clothes on the hamper outside of the bathroom. But what’s weirder is that they are women’s clothes - a sweatshirt and jeans, yeah, but there’s no way you look at how they’re cut and sized and thinking that a guy is supposed to fit in them. Boxers though, and no bra, thank God. They don’t fit exactly - a few too many inches of bare ankle show where the jeans stop and borrowed sneakers start, and there’s no chance he’s fitting anything thicker than a penny into any of the pockets.

“Why do you have women’s clothes, again?” Murdock closes whatever he was doing on his phone and slides it back into his pocket. “You don’t have a second secret life, right?”

“They were Karen’s.” And then Peter’s the guy who just made fun of his friend’s dead wife, fantastic. “Nice haircut.”

“Thanks - I hate it too.”

“So what’s your plan?”

“Pizza. At least two, I’m thinking - one with pepperoni, maybe the other with extra cheese.”

“...Parker.”

Right. Peter tugs at the too-tight collar of the Hudson U sweatshirt and clears his throat. It doesn’t do any good - his voice is still high as a kite, soft when it should sound smarmy. “And then head on over to see if the Avengers know anybody with the power to do this. Or if they’ve got someone the fix it. Thor probably can’t, you think?” The Scarlet Witch probably could though, but Peter’s still not on speaking terms with either of the Maximoffs.

“You should see a doctor,” Matt says quietly. Peter grits his teeth.

“My ribs have seen worse. Kraven’s tried to barbecue them way more times - some bruising isn’t going to a thing.” Murdock doesn’t repeat the suggestion, which is good, because there’s absolutely zero need for him to see a doctor unless they’ve got magical medicine machines able to give him his dick back. “Thanks for the use of your shower and your couch - and sorry about breaking in, won’t do it again, scout’s honor.” He’s not going to mention any possible unremovable stains on that couch if Matt isn’t going to. “Do you have a mask or something I could borrow? Don’t want people taking photos of this face and trying to say there’s a third new webslinger around.”

“Take a cab - I’ll spot you.” Matt slips out his wallet and while normally Peter would scoff openly at he, the amazing spectacular Spider-Man taking a _cab_ like some _tourist_ , he’ll do anything Murdock wants after Matt hands him a folded hundred dollar bill. “I’ll walk you out.”

“Such a gentleman,” he jabs, fighting to get the money into the jeans’ front pocket. Matt does that corner of the mouth smile again, picking up the information cane for the benefit of the blind act to his neighbors. None of them seem too terribly surprised to see Mr. Murdock leaving his loft with company, which makes Peter wonder how many poorly dressed women Matt has coming and going from his place. He’ll have to ask him over the drink he most assuredly owes him.

Peter waves an arm wildly in the air once they’re at the street corner, glaring at every already-occupied taxi that drives by until one finally stops on a dime, barely missing going headlight first into the public phone. “Call me if you want help taking down who did this,” Matt Murdock leaves him with. And it’s good that he wears those little red glasses, because it means Peter can pretend that the look Matt gives him isn’t sad and full of pity.

“Like I said, I can’t afford to replace the lock if it’s broken!”

The taxi door snaps shut, and it’s only after Peter gives his building’s address that he realizes he’s going to have to break into his own apartment, having lost the key and become unable to pass as Peter Parker, legal occupant.

“So, pretty lady,” jokes the driver, his accent Latverian, “how you know Mister Murdock? He very popular.”

What a godawful week this is going to be.

**Author's Note:**

> Set during some nebulous universal reset after Dan Slott's ASM & Zdarsky's Spectacular runs, unlikely to really be affected too much by ongoing storylines/Nick Spencer's takeover. Featuring the 'status-quo' Spider-Man setting - photographer with the Bugle, etc - minus Peter being very much an adult. 
> 
> Consider 616 canon up to Marvel Legacy fair game for referencing, though. While I'm not up for having a rules lawyer argument over Marvel continuity, I would appreciate blatant and jarring continuity flaws being brought to my attention.
> 
> NOT MCU compliant. 
> 
> Please suggest any tags you would like added to this work.


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